


Mind’s Eye

by hitlikehammers



Category: Iron Man (Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-06-09
Updated: 2008-06-09
Packaged: 2017-11-01 01:52:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/350662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hitlikehammers/pseuds/hitlikehammers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He doesn’t understand what possessed him to believe that this world was ever worth saving. Movieverse.  <b>Spoilers for Iron Man (2008).</b></p>
            </blockquote>





	Mind’s Eye

**Author's Note:**

> Something I’ve been working on here and there for a while, trying to get the tone right. I think I’m as close to what I envisioned as I am going to get, so here’s the final product. Something stream-of-consciousness-y and disjointed; hopefully it works. And as a note – the rating is precautionary to cover about three paragraphs of what is probably the least explicit sex I’ve ever written. In case you were concerned.

Sometimes, in his dreams, he can feel his mother’s heart stop.

He knows that it’s absurd, that he wasn’t even present when his mother breathed her last, but that doesn’t matter, not in his dreams. He remembers plainly, as just a small boy, what it felt like to be cradled against his mother’s chest, how soothing the breeze, the cadence of her breaths were to his young mind, how crucial the sound of her heart seemed to his simplistic worldview. He remembers how, even then, the dip of silence between the beats used to make his stomach drop, and when he feels it now, when he hears it slow and finally stop, when there is nothing, no sound, attacking his ears in the foggy mist of his fabricated recollections, he feels nauseous, he feels lost, and empty – so fucking empty. His own heart sinks and he wants to curl up in the warmth of every thought and image of his mom, his rock, that he can still manage to call to mind; he wants to hide in the glimmer of her smile, in the strong embrace of her arms, in the softness of her cheek on his head as she held to him, as she told him that she was proud, that she loved him. He never wants to leave the place where she once loved him.

He hates that she’s not there, hates that she’s gone, hates that he never got the chance to say goodbye. He hates that, not so long ago, he was the type of person that she may no longer have been proud of, that she may not have been able to love so easily. He hates that he wonders sometimes, more than sometimes, whether he’d ever have become that sort of man, had she lived. He hates that he’ll never know.

He hates the reverberation, the echo of the last give, the final spark of life as her chest lies still beneath his head, because he’s there in his dreams, pressed against her torso and clinging to her, and there is no blood, only his tears, and that bothers him more than the sickening silence that tells him that he’s lost her, that she’s not coming back.

Other times, on the nights in between, he dreams of fucking his personal assistant into oblivion.

He thinks idly, sometimes, that he could never tell a shrink this, if ever he agreed to see one, because it borders a little too much on Freudian for even him to ignore. But he knows the real reason behind the patterns of his unconscious mind, his psyche – he dreams in blacks, whites and reds; in what he knows, what he wants, and what he fears; of the people he’s had, the people he’s loathed, and the people he’s loved.

Before Afghanistan, he never even remembered his dreams, if indeed he dreamt at all; he imagines that if he _did_ dream, back then, it would have always been the black and the white; the knows and wants, the haves and hates. Now, he remembers them, or at least pieces of them, and they’re always red; they’re always love and fear and sometimes he thinks that there’s white, that there’s want, but he knows better; he knows that all he wants, _really_ wants, anymore, is more what he loves, and fears, in the end.

There’s never any foreplay, any buildup when he dreams of her; it’s always straight to the bed, and he thinks that’s because he knows, deep down, that any attempt to woo her, he would royally fuck up in an instant. His subconscious, apparently, deals in small mercies here, and for that he’s grateful. It never fails that they start in various states of undress; he’s always more convinced when she still has a shirt on, particularly when it’s a button up – though he prefers when it’s _his_ – but he doesn’t exactly mind when she’s completely naked against him. Each and every time, she’s flushed and freckled and it’s beautiful, though sometimes the freckles shift; the only ones that stay in the same place are just below her bellybutton, a half-circle underneath her navel that begs to be traced by his tongue. She’s pliant, but firm beneath him, every time, and most importantly, though she’s embarrassed, hesitant, she is unashamed. He presses against her, his erection lined against the folds of skin between her thighs, and he’s almost amazed, because he doesn’t feel the need to grope at her; instead, he just needs to be with her, next to her, on top of her, inside her – a part of her – in any way he possibly can, and he doesn’t need to wrap the cups of his palms around her nipples, doesn’t need to splay out his thumbs to meet in between her breasts in order to claim ownership, not this time. With her, he doesn’t need to grab at her, pull at her; in fact, he only brings his subtly-shaking fingers to her chest when he aches to feel her warmth, her softness; when he needs to touch the violent flutter of her heart as it races beneath his hands, to know that he’s fueling that, he’s causing that, to know that they’re both there and both alive, _together_ , facing a brave new world, a reality of their own creation. Suddenly, he doesn’t need claim her with his hands, but with his heart instead, and it’s frightening; he’s fucking petrified, but when she moans into his mouth and the only response he is capable of is to thrust into her, _finally_ , it all melts away. The world shrinks to a pinpoint of light that encompasses only moments – his fingers dancing at the swell of her hips, her nails dragging deep lines along the ridges in his spine; her head dropping back with the kind of whiplash-snap that good lawsuits are made of as he kisses along the planes of skin between her legs; her thighs spreading wider and his length sliding further into her – just instants that happen all at once; those instants make up everything he knows for sure, the only constants.

He doesn’t know much, really, because this is new and strange; this is uncharted territory and he is just a fool in love – but he does know that when he comes (just after she does, and only because he fights it long enough to enjoy the feel of her climax, the tight, clenching heat of it as he arches into him with a feral moan, the wet slap of their sweat-slicked skin) – he knows he’s never come like that before, not ever; not with the models or the actresses or the porn stars; _especially_ not with the porn stars. He only notices after the blood returns from his groin, and the oxygen to his lungs, that there’s a fiery-colored head shimmying down near his scrotum and doing things with her tongue that aren’t safe when he’s still so aroused. He barely processes it when she slides from beneath him, his muscles too limp and languid to hold her, and flips them both with her knees squeezed around his middle, straddling him so that the backs of her heels brush his knuckles where they are delicately cupped around the curve of her ass. She smiles down at him, soft and shy, but sure; and he’s in awe, because it’s never been like this, because he thought he’d felt it all before, and because he’s convinced this might be what it’s all about; that _she_ might be what it’s all about.

They never, not even once, actually make it to round two; and infallibly, when he jerks awake from dreams such as these, ironically enough, he always feels dirty; wretched and perverse and _pathetic_ – not because of _what_ he dreams, only because he knows _why_ he has to dream it. He can’t help but avoid her eyes at least until noon after every imagined encounter with her, every time his subconscious steps out of line and gives him exactly what he wants, if only for a night that only exists for him. She’s everything he cannot have, he suspects, or close enough to it; and he’s a sad, predictable fuck for wanting it, wanting _her_ , nonetheless. Really, he’s still the spoiled, scared, naïve little boy who fell asleep to the lull of his mother’s heartbeat, and out of everything, it’s that which destroys him in the end.

Because scared little boys cannot deal with loss, cannot handle heartbreak, and certainly don’t know how to survive something like _this_.

At a distance, he can only hope, can only pray to every deity, any and every power of influence governing this world and the next, that it’s just another dream; a horrible, heart-wrenching dream that’s so vile and painful that the word ‘nightmare’ can’t even begin to do it justice. But it’s not, he knows it’s not, because it’s too real, it hurts too much.

There is blood here, with her, blood that’s so dark and richly colored that it makes the shade of hair look pale in comparison, and he can feel it, hot and sticky beneath his feet, and he wonders if even the thick metal and thrusters in the soles of the suit would have kept him from feeling it, from knowing what it was.

He knows before he can see it, before he’s close enough to confirm it, because with her, it was never his stomach that plummeted when he couldn’t feel her heart, in the slight, innocuous pauses in between beats, but instead it was his own heart that stopped in the silence. And now; now his heart is still, and he can’t breathe, because she’s there, sprawled on the ground, victimized not because of some grand, life-saving plot, not on the grounds of some self-sacrificing mission he’d sent her on, not even because of either of their pride or stupidity, his occasional lack of foresight; the most dangerous side-effect of his unpredictability, his impulsiveness. No, she was dead because there were such things as a wrong place and a wrong time, and she had managed them both. She was dead, lost, because the world was a foul and wicked place where justice did not live, and fair did not exist, where love had never conquered and loss would always triumph.

As he kneels at her side, knowing that it’s over, knowing that he’s too late, something dies inside of him, and it sears, it burns, like a supernova beneath his ribs, like a dying star – everything exploding at once against his heart before there is nothing, absolutely nothing, a hollow cavity where the very essence of himself used to reside.

He touches her, and she’s cold, and it makes no sense, because for all the talk, all the bickering, all the playful criticisms he’s ever thrown her way, he knows that her undying warmth is the only thing that’s saved him all these long and trying years. He threads his hand in hers, and he cannot bring himself to feel angry, to feel vengeful, because all he can feel is the nothingness, is absence of breath, of life; the lack of a rhythmic throb at her wrist. He lines himself up against her side, settling in the pool of red near her shoulders and barely conscious of the blood that clings to his forehead as he rests his ear against her, just below the wet swell of her breasts, painfully aware of the nothing there, desperately assaulted with it, and he cannot escape.

It’s when he stops to tilt his tear-streaked face upwards, swollen eyes lifting to actually see her; when he looks, stares into those glassy, vacant eyes, too scared, too frozen to close them; too selfish to never look into them again; as he watches her in that terrible instant and knows that she’s no longer watching back, he doesn’t understand what possessed him to believe that this world was ever worth saving.

And he knows then, knows it’s the end. Knows that without her, he will never fly again, because it will only ever feel like falling. Knows that, without her, not even an arc reactor can save his heart from splintering.

He wakes as a direct result of Jarvis’ voice, combined with the gradually growing light from his increasingly transparent windows, but he only breathes when he hears her footsteps; the reassuring, predictable click of her sharp heels in a steady, staccato tempo that vibrates in his chest as the waking world bleeds into his mind. Despite the deep, resonating drum of his heart in his throat, detached and echoing as if it doesn’t belong to him anymore – which may actually be closer to the truth than he likes to consider – he feels whole at the rustle of her skirt against her nylons as she pauses at his doorway, studying the mound of him sandwiched between the sheets and the duvet.

She never speaks; sometimes, he gets a flippant sort of sigh out of her, but she never speaks before continuing on her way – she observes, briefly, and then takes her leave. And for the very first time, he’s grateful for the silence, because there is a tightness that grows in his throat as the weight of his dreams settles upon him in echoes, in fragments of memories, incongruent but flavored distinctly of loss; he knows that if she speaks, he won’t be able to keep the suffocating pressure in his chest out of his voice when he goes to reply.

“Good morning, Mr. Stark.”

He should have known today would be the day that routine would decide to fuck off and leave him hanging without an exit strategy.

He groans, because that’s what he does, and he knows it won’t arouse any suspicion. He doesn’t hear her walk away, so far is he buried into the cushion of his pillow, barricaded in the safety of its feathery give, swallowing a sob bit by bit down past his lungs, and concentrating on the unencumbered whoosh of his pulse against his eardrums, hard and heavy and fast, too fast, but slowing, calming. He cannot help the irrational tear that leaks from one eye, its damp ring on the linens only temporary, fading even as he lifts himself out of bed, so much less permanent than the sting of his dreams, the terrifying visions, the half-truths that play out in his nightmares; the manifestations of his greatest fears brought to life before his mind’s eye.

He hangs his head beneath the shower for a long time that morning, trying instead to remember what his lips felt like against her throat.


End file.
